Hurricane Katrina snatched away more than the roof of Alison Aucoin's house. It destroyed the foundation of security on which she built her life.
Now resettled in Durham, Aucoin has chronicled her new life with the help of Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. Two years after the devastating hurricane, CDS has opened "Re-collecting Family Albums: Finding Home After Katrina," an exhibit of handmade books, photographs and audio interviews of five families who settled in the Triangle. The exhibit will be on view through Jan. 8, 2008.
"There was a huge sense of powerlessness after Katrina," Aucoin says. "The collaboration, the ability to contribute to the exhibit, gave us a sense of empowerment."
After the hurricane washed away whole neighborhoods in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast in September 2005, people from across the country offered help. CDS staff organized to do what they knew how to do best, turning on tape recorders and cameras to chronicle the starting-over process for Hurricane Katrina survivors.
Many families had little to bring with them other than memories of the lives they left behind. Working with local book artist Bryant Holsenbeck, the new arrivals created albums of photographs, recollections and insights as they came to terms with their new lives. With the aid of a grant from the N.C. Arts Council, CDS hosted a book-making workshop and followed up with a team of photographers and interviewers to document how survivors were rebuilding their lives.
Aucoin hopes that visitors to the exhibit will leave with an understanding of the fragility of their own lives. She speaks from a survivor's heightened sense of appreciation for the little moments that fill one's life, knowing that tomorrow they could be gone.